The fine folks at SPIL Games have teamed up with Mochimedia to bring you the year’s first big contest! Welcome to the Reality Bytes Flash game contest! Here you will have three months to create a game of the simulation or resource management genre!
The contest will be running from February 2nd, 2010 to April 30th, 2010.
Check out the prizes! There’s $15,000 waiting for you!
- First Place – $7,000
- Second Place – $4,000
- Third Place – $2,000
- Honorable Mention (x2) – $1,000 each
Please check out the official contest page for all the information you need and official rules!
Good luck!
And yes he does! Find a plethora of AS3 tutorials for profressional developers and hobbyists alike
Visit his site here:
http://gamedev.michaeljameswilliams.com/
Still late but we think we can go beta this week. The terrain destruction system is undergoing some heavy optimization because it drops the framerate by 50% when it recalculates the terrain during an explosion. We are trying a ‘grid based recalculation by area’ method to restrict the part it recalculates. The come2play API is quirky and has some learning curve to make it behave optimally but nothing a deep dive can’t fix. Thats all for the technical wizardy my partner is doing. As for my part, here are a few new assets in the repository;
Dear Friends of Mochi,
Bob and I are thrilled to announce today that Mochi Media is joining the Shanda Games family. If you’re not familiar with Shanda Games, they are the leading online game developer, operator and publisher in the Chinese market. This partnership is a phenomenal step forward for us and I’m very excited to join forces with them as we continue building out Mochi products with additional resources and support from Shanda Games. In particular, there will be a tremendous opportunity and benefit from tapping into Shanda Games’ strength and expertise in monetizing China traffic as well as extending the reach of our platform and network to gamers all over the world. Our vision and product focus remains the same, and I’m pleased to say that the biggest change we’ll experience is the additional opportunities and resources now available to invest in our community of developers and publishers.
On behalf of the entire team here at Mochi Media, I want to extend a great big thank you to the Mochi community. We couldn’t have accomplished this milestone without you!
For more information on the merger please refer to the official announcement in our press section. I’ve also put together a quick Q&A to address any additional concerns about what this means. Please let me know if you have any questions, and stay tuned for more exciting news in the future.
Sincerely,
Jameson Hsu
Chief Mochi
Questions & Answers
Who is Shanda Games?
Shanda Games is the leading online game company in China in terms of the size and diversity of their 30+ title gaming portfolio. The online games business includes developing, operating and licensing massively multi-player online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, and advanced casual games. Their game player base consists of nearly 10 million active paying accounts, which is monetized through item-based or time-based sales of digital goods.
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by Filip on January 11, 2010 09:53 PM
Hi, Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
My name is Danny Yaroslavski, ie Coolio Niato. I’m an undergrad Computer Science student living up in the cold reaches of Canada (*cough Toronto) and make online flash games, some of which include Lightbot, Streamline and RhythmWorld.
How did you come up with the name Coolio Niato?
Much like many other developers who start with a strange alias (see The-EXP or Jmtb02) it tends to stick after a few years and gets to the point that you can’t really change it anymore. As such, Coolio Niato came about when I was in elementary school, I had no e-mail address and my best friend had one called Coolio-Viato. Now being the unimaginative child I was, I changed one letter and kept using this name for animations/games I made. As to what Viato means, neither my friend nor I now have a clue to what it was.
How did you become interested in Flash gaming, and how did you begin developing games in Flash?
It started with enrolling in an animation class. There, maybe a few weeks in, the instructor showed us how to make buttons and use tellTarget for simple interactions. When I realized that I could make my own games, games of the likes of Thing Thing and Ultimate Flash Sonic, I was extremely excited. My first game, “Falling Objects 1” was horrible; it used keyPress and shoddy collision testing. My second, “Stench of Blood” was no better. But seeing the kinds of games on Armorgames (then called Games of Gondor) and Newgrounds; games including Marvin Spectrum and Short Circuit, it inspired me to work at coding more to finally complete my first big break, “Streamline”. Nowadays, ByteJacker and Tigsource are my greatest motivation.
Many of your games have themes relating to song or music. Is this something you have a background or interest in?
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Ladies and gentlemen, Ski Runner 2 is being created in the lab. We’re starting 2010 with a bang!
-John Funtanilla
My good friend Kevin Willson directed a video that was submitted to the ‘Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest. The video is now one of the 6 Finalist. The name of his video is ‘Casket’ and its by FAR the best video in the contest. Click through to watch the video and vote for it. You can cast a vote everyday between now and Jan 31st.
I had some credits left over from buying Castle Crashers, so rather than wasting them on ports of 16bit arcade machines that aren’t half as good as you remember, I decided to show love to some indie developers. All the games I bought were 80 “points” which is about £0.70 so probably about 1 dollar or 1 Euro. The developer gets about 70%, the rest going to the borg. There are games on for more than that, but they really aren’t any better than the 80 point games, so what’s the point. I also downloaded a load of demos to try different games out. There’s no free on XBox live, so no “lite” versions like on iPhone. Just 4 minute demos, then you have to make your mind up and buy it, or not. All the games are made with XNA / C# which is all completely free, and very powerful for both 2D and 3D games, so well done Microsoft on that.
My overall impression was that the best games were really good, but there’s a very steep drop off down to bad games, so most games aren’t worth buying. Luckily there is a very good menu system for browsing by genre, top-rated, most-downloads, newest etc. Much better than iPhone appstore in this respect. Overall I would say the games are no more “professional” or polished from Flash games, and other than some 3D effects on effectively 2D game engines, there wasn’t much you couldn’t do in Flash. I’d say the quality on iPhone is probably higher, but this is due to big players like Sega and EA being involved – just wait ’til us Flashers get on the appstore and drag it’s good names through the mud
Last year I started building a game for this platform, but that was abandoned when I left Bloc. I’d love to get one finished and distributed over Xbox Live – but there are things to weigh-up here. Objectively there’s not much to choose between the 2 platforms if you are making a game. On Flash you’ll get amazing reach and faster development (for 2D at least). On Xbox Indie you’ll get a better form factor (TV + sofa + 4 controllers + 4 buddies = lols) but a much smaller audience. Money wise Flash games sponsorships and ad-revenues aren’t great, but then you’re not going to sell that many Xbox games either, or iPhone games for that matter, so at the end of the day what you make is much more important than the platform you choose. With that in mind, here is my rundown of the games I bought, favourite first.
- Miner Dig Deep. Basic graphics, no enemies, you can’t die – doesn’t sound too exciting right? Well Miner Dig Deep is like crack-cocaine once you get into it. It’s a gentle 2D mining platformer where you dig deeper and deeper into the group collecting minerals and selling them to buy better equipment. I thought I would hate this game, but it’s probably my pick for Game of Year 2009. My grade: A+ or 5 /5.
- Gerbil Physics. A lovingly polished physics puzzle where you blast Gerbils around beautifully painted backgrounds using bombs. Just like you’re average Flash Box2D physics game, but with a bit more polish. It leaves you wanting more levels, but that’s just a mark of how much fun it is. My grade: A or 5/5
- Jonny Platform’s Biscuit Romp – An old-school puzzle-platformer, with a decidedly British flavour (e.g. you jump on bourbon biscuits) that reminded me of the UK’s Amiga/Atari ST indie scene. The puzzles and jumping action are just hard enough without going over. The graphics are generally pretty, apart from the main character, who looks (intentionally?) a bit rubbish. A- or (4/5)
- Ninja Bros. The slick and cool giant pixel art (think Canabalt etc) and a great premise, are slightly detracted by the fairly savage difficulty of this puzzle-platformer. You control 2, 3 or 4 ninjas simultaneously – the thumb-stick makes them all move at once, but each fire button makes a different one jump. They are each in a different room but levers in one room will open doors in another. It’s a headf*** and also requires some lightning reflexes, so not really a casual game in any sense. After many attempts I finally cleared the “easy” and “normal” levels, but “Hard” is so far too challenging, so I doubt I’ll ever unlock”nightmare”. So really I’m only ever going to see half the content. B+ or (4/5);
- Junkyard Battle. A very promising 3D physics stacker, that turns out to be buggy and frustrating. The presentation and premise are both good, but some weird behaviour from the physics engine spoiled it for me. A physics engine is like a wild horse that needs to be tamed, or it will kick you in the face, as happens here, where objects slide up hills and other strange behaviour. The difficulty also ramps up way too quickly. This team should stick at it though and do another game, because there’s potential here. C- or (2/5).
Sorry no time to add screenshots – just check the links out instead. Overall I’d say that if you have an Xbox and couple of bucks, check some of these out, or find you own gems on Xbox live. Or just play some free Flash games
The 13th already ? And not a single post.
Like everyone else in the world right now we’re just buried in work / seasonal joy.
As an ultra quick recap regards Ionic, I’m just finishing off the Juggernaut baddie right now. I think it’s the only one which wasn’t in the beta, so hopefully it’ll come as a surprise. It’s needing some special case code just for it, due to the sheer size of the sod. Also it’s got multiple weapons, like all good bosses should.
Hopefully he should be done in the next couple of hours, then it’s just tweaking and adding the remaining attack waves, dropping the final assets in from Lux ( Who has done such an excellent job, especially seeing how he came to the project so late and has had to cope with the programmers thing of “NO! It’s got to be that size for a reason“, which all artists hate ), the final credits at the end for when you complete the game, which are still in draft form as I keep remembering people I forgot, and we should be good to go.
We’re still looking to have it up on FGL by close of play tomorrow, and like every big project it’s hard to get your head around the fact that the finishing line is in sight at last. I’m sure it’ll be tweaked and prodded once it’s up there.
We are really looking forward to how it does once it’s up for bidding. It’s quite a risky experiment doing a AAA game like this, we’re really not sure if it will pay for itself, never mind fund the next game. We have a psychological figure in mind that we want it to hit, so long as we get that then everything else is gravy.
In saying that, even if it dies on it’s arse in terms of money, I couldn’t really care less ( Well, being able to pay the bills would be nice ) as it’s the best game I’ve ever done and I’ve been so lucky to have the support of so many friends during it’s development. Ah, that’s beautiful.
I really can’t wait until the blog post with the games official link. Hopefully we’ll be able to get it out before the end of the year.
Squize.
We experiment with a different animation pipeline for every game and I wanted to define a more efficient system. When conceptualizing the game I got ahead of myself and ended up with an idea that was much more grand than I initially envisioned. I spent a lot of time debating whether I should extend the game, especially when I had ideas for other games that I felt more passionate about.
Epic Shadow Office
